Open access FAQ

Open access as discussed in relation to this policy refers to free availability of journal articles on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful, noncommercial purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

Many OA advocates support this unrestricted access because they believe the results of tax-payer funded research should be shared; since citizens have paid for this research, they should be able to access it at no additional charge.

Many OA advocates also support unrestricted access because knowledge itself, or information, is a public good. A public good is something beneficial to everyone who seeks it, without added use diminishing its value.Common examples of public goods include: law enforcement, lighthouses, clean air and other environmental goods, and information goods, such as software development, authorship, and invention.

Open access has been driven by several forces:

The web offers new methods of publication: it makes distribution of research easier, wider, faster, and frequently less expensive.

The web offers new outlets and methods for sharing and using research and for supporting teaching, creating demand for an access model that allows faculty and universities to take full advantage of these new outlets and methods (e.g. in settings like MIT’s OpenCourseWare) or in institutional or discipline-based repositories for research (e.g. DSpace@MIT, or the archive for physics and related fields, ArXiv.)

Some supporters believe that open access will address entrenched problems with high prices and strict use and purchase terms faced by universities buying traditional journals in digital form.

Open access to research and scholarship is not free—there are costs involved in making research available. The economic models to support unrestricted access to research are still being developed; the common thread among the models is that open access research is available at no charge to all readers.

One model that exists is for there to be a payment when the author submits an article. Usually this charge to publish an open access article is covered by research grant funds. In 2004, one study by Elsevier found that this “author side” payment model encompassed just 17% of open access journals. In an updated study in 2007, Bill Hooker did a survey of all known open access journals and found that only 18% charged fees. The open access publisher BioMed Central offers a table comparing such author side payments.

Other economic models are also being experimented with. For example, some new open access publishers, such as the for-profit BioMed Central, require author payments, but these are waived for institutions who’ve purchased a membership, as the MIT Libraries have for MIT. In other cases, such as the not-for-profit PLoS (Public Library of Science), the MIT Libraries’ institutional membership reduces the publication fee for MIT faculty and researchers.

Other titles are subsidized, often by scholarly societies, institutions, or foundations. The 2004 Elsevier study found that government or university subsidies accounted for 55% of the total open access titles, the largest portion. The remaining open access titles (28%) that were not supported by ‘author side’ payments, or by government or universities, were found to be subsidized by paid subscriptions to their print equivalents.

Some journals are entirely open access; every article is available without restriction. Other journals are ‘hybrid’ in that they are traditional subscription-based journals, but offer authors the choice to pay a fee to make their individual article freely accessible to anyone worldwide. The other articles in the journal remain accessible only through subscription.

There are several options for making your research more widely available:

Publish in an open access journal. The Directory of Open Access Journals offers a list of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in a broad array of disciplines. Select “For authors” to see the various open access options available.

Choose an open access option in a traditional journal that has become “hybrid,” giving the author the option to pay for an individual article to be open access.

Consider publishing in a more cost-effective journal, which you can find by searching in a database that allows you to check the relative cost and value of a journal as assessed by a formula developed by an Economist at the University of California Santa Barbara, Ted Bergstrom.

Consider publishing in an open access journal. You can check a range of impact factors to help evaluate journals.

Consider publishing in an alternative journal; such journals are lower cost and offer publishing models that encourage broad distribution and reuse of content.